Archive Planets

This is not really a good photo, but more an experiment I tried several times before: can a Canon Powershot SX1 bridge camera pick up Jupiter’s moons? Yes, it can – they may be blurry, but you can definitely see all four Galilean Moons on this photo made on January 1 at about 2:15am. Jupiter itself is grossly overexposed and the camera is not even able to resolve any detail from the planet, but it’s still astonishing that it is possible to pick up the Galilean Moons with it.

After the smoke from the fireworks had cleared, so had the sky and we were treated to a nice conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter – which, as always, looked much more awesome seen with your own eyes than in this photo. This was a great way to start the new year!

Jupiter and Venus are appearing very close together in the sky at the moment and yesterday, we were able to actually see the two planets together. I was only able to take this photo through the fly net on the kitchen window, which left some interesting artifacts, but even the distinct shape of the Venus phase at the moment is clearly visible. Usually I don’t even get them together in one camera frame and this is a 1600×1065 crop from a 10 megapixel original, so they are already really close!

I did this once before in January with the old camera to answer the question if it’s possible to pick up Jupiter’s moons – and yes, it works. This new capture with the SX1 from yesterday shows all four Galilean moons, from bottom left to top right, Europa, Io, Ganymede and, very faint, Callisto. There are, of course, no surface details on Jupiter visible and the size of the planet is blown up too much because I had to overexpose the image to get the moons to show up, but it’s still amazing to see that the camera can pick up objects with magnitudes between 5 and 6!

Can you pick up Jupiter’s moons with an old digital bridge camera? It turns out you can: this is a 100% crop of an 8 megapixel image from my Canon Powershot S5 at 12x zoom – while the camera is not able pick up details from Jupiter’s cloud bands, all four galilean moons are distinctly visible here. It’s by no means a pretty shot, but it’s still amazing that it’s possible at all – this is another planet in our solar system with its moons! This was photographed on January 12th at about 19:00 CET.